Conrack and Its Critics

"You can take any stupidity you like and say, there, that's a liberal for you. Word covers simply everything." --Wilfrid Sheed, Office Politics

FILM CRITICS HAVE been under such great pressures that it may be cruel to reprimand their insensitivity and silliness. The 60s, after all, were as tumultuous in New York film circles as they were in Washington, with no surcease of conflicts expected for the '70s. No sooner did beleaguered pundits establish film as art than they debated how it worked as art--whether it was visual, dramatic, or kinetic. The question "Are Hollywood directors really artists?," an extended corollary, took up a lot of print space from early on. Attacks later came from other quarters: what was film's relevance, its social responsibility? As that question now falls into cultural history's dustbin, sure to be reawakened at some future crisis, an entirely different medium--television--threatens to kill once and for all film's importance as art and communications.

Pity the poor film critics. Few have been able to keep their eye on the art they criticize, much less on the world that it reflects.

Conrack opened in New York a month ago. It received two pre-reviews. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael praised the freshness of the story: a young South Carolinian goes to isolated Yamacraw Island to teach illiterate black children. Kael loved the lustiness and poetic charm of the hero, Pat Conroy (known to his students as Conrack), who overcomes reactionary school officials and intransigent students and parents to give his class a sense of the world beyond Yamacraw--before he is fired. She dunned some of the film's simplifications but saluted its spirit. Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic, applauded the film as entertainment, though he scored its faults more heavily than Kael; he singled out Jon Voight's performance and Martin Ritt's tactful, sympathetic direction, and noted that if the film relies on sentiment, organic, well-dramatized sentiment is always justifiable.

Then the post-premiere reviews descended, a deluge of chic critical epithets. Nora Sayre of The Times sniffed at the film's "liberalism" and "sentimentality," she felt that non-radical leftists have enough problems without such corniness. Newsweek's Paul Zimmerman asked, "Who needs a film about a white man who teaches blacks how to think?" (But if black children are taught to think by blacks or liberated whites, aren't the rednecks the only ones who lose?) And in Time, Richard Schickel compared Conroy's relentless idealism to Chinese water torture.

None of these reviews--as fuzzyminded as they were--presaged the visciousness of Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice, or the pretentiousness of Eugenia Collier in the Sunday Times two weeks ago. Sarris attacked what he called "UNESCO-inclined critics," proclaiming that those who like Conrack (and other more-or-less "message" movies, including Sounder and Hoa Binh) are hopeless much-headed idealists, overwhelmed by uplift. But the critics Mad Andrew wrote about are figments of his imagination, since the only famous critics who praised the film (Kael and Kauffmann) are rigorous, not at all the "melting marsh-mallows" of his bile-ridden column. Sarris took potshots at the actual Conroy as well as at the film and its defenders, vaguely condemning him--though rhetorically denying it--for being young, energetic, individualistic, and anti-establishment. (Everything film critics are not, these days.)

Sarris was not as explicitly liberal-dumping as the others. But he did, consider the attitudes of the conservative school superintendent and the Yamacraw principal "realistic:" although what they counsel is the acquiescence of blacks before a racist society. Sarris was more concerned with savaging the do-gooder who confronts them. (I'd think even a New York conservative would find these sentiments uncomfortable.) Sarris's statement, "only the teacher has a private destiny, whereas the students are a clustered blob of oppressed humanity," betrays his critical carelessness. For Conrack is always exhorting his kids to learn, to achieve, "to be Caesar or nothing."

EUGENIA Collier's arguments were more persuasive. Her rightful concern for the film's neglect of native Sea Islands culture follows from her profession (she teaches black literature at a Baltimore college). But her professional disposition may well be the sole source of her criticism. Although she says, "the Sea Islands actually have a very rich folk culture," she reiterates her charge instead of proving her argument. According to Conroy's book, The Water is Wide (the basis for Irving Ravetch and Harriett Frank Jr.'s script) pollution from surrounding factories ruined Yamacraw Island and starved its hunters and fishermen. Frustration spurred violence that scarred all families. Perhaps Collier cannot believe that a black culture's "wisdom, strength and humor" could abide such adversity. Her contention that Conroy takes on "the White Man's Burden of bringing civilization to the uncivilized" misinterprets Conroy's purpose. When Conroy talks to his kids about general American history and culture (white and black--James Brown and Willie Mays get mentioned as much as Babe Ruth), his real aim is to encourage them to articulate and share their own thoughts and feelings.

ALTHOUGH JON VOIGHT performs wonders as Conroy--he is both sensitive and charismatic, full-bodied and full of wit--he doesn't have to carry the film. The 21 non-professional kids (all from the Georgia coast) act up a storm. When Voight's Conroy introduces his class to Brahms and Beethoven, or, in an effort to blow the lard from their brains, punctuates his classroom questions with a bike horn, we are gratified not only by the teacher's love and cleverness, but by the responses of his kids--abashed, suspicious, delighted, and finally openhearted.

The film does have problems. But they have little to do with race, liberality or mushiness. Ritt, Ravetch and Frank revel in the grotesque. The school superintendent and principal (glosses of groups of figures from Conroy's book) are educational Bull Connors. More interesting characters, like the island's hermit Mad Billie, and a fast-talking island slicker named Quickfellow, have neither history nor room for growth. The filmmakers also fail to develop some intriguing themes: Conroy must have influenced his children's lives beyond the classroom, but when their usually stand-offish parents strike to protest Conroy's dismissal, there is no explanation for the growth of their militancy. At times we see creators tug to pull their fable together: a midwife portentously tells Conroy, to "treat the kids right, and they'll do right by you," and he explains his work to the people of Beaufort, South Carolina (unbelievably) via sound van.

But to condemn Conrack for loose threads is like rejecting a lover for ugly toenails. At its best, the film embodies necessary humane values of a vigorous society: charity, strength and imagination.

According to Variety, Conrack is cooler box-office in New York than in other cities. You can't blame only semi-sighted, axe-grinding, propagandistic critics for its failure; the film has only one star, and little explicit sex or violence. But if critics were doing their jobs, rather than giving glib lip-service to politics, the film at least might have won the audience that flocked to Sounder. Conrack's makers took a story pregnant with social meaning and developed it in their own light, with unforced grit and soul; it would be scandalous if its poor showing kept others from doing the same. If filmmakers must fear being labeled "sentimental liberals" for telling the truth artistically, as they see it, the creative and critical arenas of politics and art have been debased.